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Other Ling Newsletters
« Call for Papers: UMOP 38 (Ellipsis) | Main | Chris Potts in NYC»
Logic Lecture at Smith
The annual Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz/Thomas Tymoczko Memorial Logic Lecture
Edwin Mares
Victoria University of Wellington
Partial Information and the Meaning of All
Smith College, December 6, 2007, 7:30 pm
Abstract
According to one way of doing semantics that I endorse we do not talk about the whole world, but rather about bits of it called situations. The standard treatment of 'all' is not appropriate in this framework. Merely having the information that each entity in the domain of a situation has a particular property is not sufficient for us to infer that everything has that property. We also need to know, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, that the list of objects that have that property is exhaustive. This paper is an introduction to a new treatment of all due to myself and Rob Goldblatt. The paper gives a philosophical justification of this treatment of the universal quantifier and relates it to current debates about the nature of facts. The paper will be very informal, and presupposes no logical background except the basic understanding of natural deduction that one gets in an introductory logic course.